Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass

  VII

  The world at that time was circumscribed by Franz Joseph I. On each stamp, on every coin, and on every postmark his likeness confirmed its stability and the dogma of its oneness. This was the world, and there were no other worlds besides, the effigies of the imperial-and-royal old man proclaimed. Everything else was make-believe, wild pretense, and usurpation. Franz Joseph I rested on top of everything and checked the world in its growth.

  By inclination we tend to be loyal, dear reader. Being also affable and easygoing, we are not insensitive to the attractions of authority. Franz Joseph I was the embodiment of the highest authority. If that authoritarian old man threw all his prestige on the scales, one could do nothing but give up all one's aspirations and longings, manage as well as one could in the only possible world—that is, a world without illusions and romanticism—and forget.

  But when the prison seemed to be irrevocably shut, when the last bolt-hole was bricked up, when everything had conspired to keep silent about You, Oh God, when Franz Joseph had barred and sealed even the last chink so that one should not be able to see You, then You rose wearing a flowing cloak of seas and continents and gave him the lie. You, God, took upon Yourself the odium of heresy and revealed this enormous, magnificent, colorful blasphemy to the world. Oh splendid Heresiarch! You struck me with the burning book, with that explosive stamp album from Rudolph's pocket. I did not know at that time that stamp albums could be pocket-size; in my blindness I at first took it for a paper pistol with which we sometimes pretended to fire at school, from under the seats, to the annoyance of teachers. Yet this little album symbolized God's fervent tirade, a fiery and splendid philippic against Franz Joseph and his estate of prose. It was the book of truth and splendor.

  I opened it, and the glamour of colorful worlds, of becalmed spaces, spread before me. God walked through it, page after page, pulling behind Him a train woven from all the zones and climates, Canada, Honduras, Nicaragua, Abracadabra, Hipporabundia ... I at last understood you, Oh God. These were the disguises for your riches, these were the first random words that came to your mind. You reached into your pocket and showed me, like a handful of marbles, the possibilities that your world contained. You did not attempt to be precise; you said whatever came into your mind. You might equally well have said Panphibrass and Halleleevah, and the air among palms would flutter with motley parrot wings, and the sky, like an enormous, sapphire, cabbage rose, blown open to its core, would show in its dazzling center your frightening peacock eye, would shine with the glare of your wisdom, and would spread a super-scent. You wanted to dazzle me, Oh God, to seduce me, perhaps to boast, for even You have moments of vanity when you succumb to self-congratulation. Oh, how I love these moments!

  How greatly diminished you have become, Franz Joseph, and your gospel or prose! I looked for you in vain. At last I found you. You were among the crowd, but how small, unimportant, and gray. You were marching with some others in the dust of the highway, immediately following South America, but preceding Australia, and singing together with the others: Hosanna!

  VIII

  I became a disciple of the new gospel. I struck up a friendship with Rudolph. I admired him, feeling vaguely that he was only a tool, that the album was destined for somebody else. In fact, he seemed to me only its guardian. He catalogued, he stuck in and unstuck the stamps, he put the album away and locked the drawer. In reality he was sad, like a man who guesses that he is waning while I am waxing. He was like the man who came to straighten the Lord's paths.

  IX

  I had reasons to believe that the album was predestined for me. Many signs seemed to point to its holding a message and a personal commission for me. There was, for instance, the fact that no one felt himself to be the owner of the album, not even Rudolph, who acted more like its servant, an unwilling and lazy servant in the bond of duty. Sometimes envy would flood his heart with bitterness. He rebelled inwardly against the role of keeper of a treasure that did not really belong to him. He looked with envy on the reflection of distant worlds that flooded my face with a gamut of color. Only in that reflection did he notice the glow of these pages. His own feelings were not really engaged.

  X

  I once saw a prestidigitator. He stood in the center of the stage, slim and visible to everybody, and demonstrated his top hat, showing its empty white bottom. Thus having assured us that his art was above suspicion of fraudulent manipulation, he traced with his wand a complicated magic sign and at once, with exaggerated precision and openness, began to produce from the top hat paper strips, colored ribbons by the foot, by the yard, finally by the mile. The room filled with the rustling mass of color, became bright from the heaps of light tissue, while the artist still pulled at the endless weft, despite the spectators' protests, their cries of ecstasy and spasmodic sobs until it became clear that all this effort was nothing to him, that he was drawing this plenty, not from his own, but from supernatural resources that had been opened to him and that were beyond human measures and calculations.

  But some people who could perceive the real sense of this demonstration went home deep in thought and enchanted, having had a glimpse of the truth that God is boundless.

  XI

  Now perhaps is the time for drawing a parallel between Alexander the Great and my modest self. Alexander was susceptible to the aroma of countries. His nostrils anticipated untold possibilities. He was one of those men on whose head God lays His hand while they are asleep so that they get to know what they don't know, so that they are filled with intuitions and conjectures, while the reflections of distant worlds pass across their closed eyelids. Alexander, however, took divine allusions too literally. As a man of action—that is to say, of a shallow spirit— he interpreted his mission as that of conqueror of the world. He felt as unfulfilled as I was, his breast heaved with the same kind of sighs, and he hungered after ever new horizons and landscapes. There was no one who could point out his mistake. Not even Aristotle could understand him. Thus, although he had conquered the whole world, he died disappointed, doubting the God who kept eluding him and doubting God's miracles. His likeness adorned the coins and seals of many lands. In the end, he became the Franz Joseph of his age.

  XII

  I should like to give the reader at least an approximate idea of that album in which the events of that spring were adumbrated, then finally arranged. An indescribable, alarming wind blew through the avenue of these stamps, the decorated street of crests and standards, and unfurled these emblems in an ominous silence, under the shadow of clouds that loomed threateningly over the horizon. Then the first heralds appeared in the empty street, in dress uniforms with red brassards, perspiring, perplexed, full of the sense of their mission. They gestured silently, preoccupied and solemn, the street immediately darkened from the advancing procession, and all the side streets were obscured by the steps of the demonstrating throngs. It was an enormous manifestation of countries, a universal May Day, a march-past of the world. The world was demonstrating with thousands of hands raised as for an oath, it averred in a thousand voices that it was not behind Franz Joseph but behind somebody infinitely greater. The demonstration was bathed in a pale red, almost pink light, the liberating color of enthusiasm. From Santo Domingo, from San Salvador, from Florida came hot and panting delegations, clothed in raspberry red, who waved cherry pink bowler hats from which chattering goldfinches escaped in twos and threes. Happy breezes sharpened the glare of trumpets, brushed softly against the surface of the instruments, and brought forth tiny sparks of electricity. In spite of the large numbers taking part in the march-past, everything was orderly, the enormous parade unfolded itself in silence and according to plan. There were moments when the flags, waving violently from balconies, writhing in amaranthine spasms, in violent silent flutters, in frustrated bursts of enthusiasm, became still as for a roll call: the whole street then turned red and full of a silent threat, while in the darkened distance the carefully counted salvoes of artillery resounded dully, all fo
rty-nine of them in the dusk-filled air.

  And then the horizon suddenly clouded over as before a spring storm, with only the instruments of the bands brassily shining, and in the silence one could hear the murmur of the darkening sky, the rustle of distant spaces, while from nearby gardens the scent of bird cherry floated in concentrated doses and dissolved imperceptibly in the air.

  XIII

  One day toward the end of April the morning was warm and gray; people walking in the streets and looking ahead did not notice that the trees in the park were splitting in many places and showing sweet, festering wounds.

  Enmeshed in the black net of tree branches, the gray, sultry sky lay heavily on human shoulders. People scrambled from under its weight like June bugs in a warm dampness or, without a thought in their heads, sat hunched on the benches of the park, a sheet of faded newspaper on their laps.

  Then at about ten o'clock the sun appeared like a luminous smudge from under the swollen body of cloud, and suddenly among the tree branches all the fat buds began to shine and a veil of chirruping uncovered the now pale golden face of the day. Spring had come.

  And at once the avenue of the park, empty a moment before, filled with people hurrying in all directions, as if this were the hub of the city, and blossomed with women's frocks. Quick and shapely girls were hurrying—some to work in shops and offices, others to assignations— but for a few moments, while they passed the openwork basket of the avenue, which now exuded the moisture of a greenhouse and was filled with birds' trills, they seemed to belong to that avenue and to that hour, to be the extras in a scene of the theater of spring, as if they had been reborn in the park together with the delicate branches and leaves. The park avenue seemed crowded with their refreshing hurry and the rustle of their underskirts. Ah, these airy, freshly starched shifts, led for a walk under the openwork shadow of the spring corridor, shifts damp under the armpits, now drying in the violet breezes of distance! Ah, these young, rhythmical steps, those legs hot from exercise in their new crunchy silk stockings that covered red spots and pimples, the healthy spring rash of hot-blooded bodies! The whole park became shamelessly pimply, and all the trees came out in buddy spots, which burst with the voices of birds.

  And then the avenue became empty, and under the vaults of trees one could hear the soft squeaks of a perambulator on high wheels. In the small varnished canoe, engulfed in highly starched bands of linen, like in a bouquet, slept something more precious than a flower. The girl who slowly pushed the pram would lean over it from time to time, tilt to its back wheels the swinging, squeaking basket that bloomed with white freshness, and blow caressingly into the bouquet of tulle until she had reached its sweet sleepy core, across whose dreams tides of cloud and light floated like a fairy tale.

  At noon the paths of the park were crisscrossed with light and shadow, and the song of birds hung continuously in the air, but the women passing on the edge of the promenade were already tired, their hair matted with migraine, and their faces fatigued by the spring. Later still, the avenue emptied completely, and in the silence of the early afternoon smells began slowly to drift across from the park restaurant.

  XIV

  Every day at the same time, accompanied by her governess, Bianca could be seen walking in the park. What can I say about Bianca, how can I describe her? I only know that she is marvelously true to herself, that she fulfills her program completely. My heart tight with pleasure, I notice again and again how with every step, light as a dancer, she enters into her being and how with each of her movements she unconsciously hits the target.

  Her walk is ordinary, without excessive grace, but its simplicity is touching, and my heart fills with gladness that Bianca can be herself so simply, without any strain or artifice.

  Once she slowly lifted her eyes to me, and the seriousness of that look pierced me like an arrow. Since then, I have known that I can hide nothing from her, that she knows all my thoughts. At that moment, I put myself at her disposal, completely and without reservation. She accepted this by almost imperceptibly closing her eyes. It happened without a word, in passing, in one single look.

  When I want to imagine her, I can only evoke one meaningless detail: the chapped skin on her knees, like a boy's; this is deeply touching and guides my thoughts into tantalizing regions of contradiction, into blissful antinomies. Everything else, above and below her knees, is transcendental and defies my imagination.

  XV

  Today I delved again into Rudolph's stamp album. What a marvelous study! The text is full of cross-references and allusions. But all the lines converge toward Bianca. What blissful conjectures! My expectations and hopes are ever more dazzling. Ah, how I suffer, how heavy is my heart with the mysteries that I anticipate!

  XVI

  A band is now playing every evening in the city park, and people on their spring outings fill the avenues. They walk up and down, pass one another, and meet again in symmetrical, continuously repeated patterns. The young men are wearing new spring hats and nonchalantly carrying gloves in their hands. Through the hedges and between the tree trunks the dresses of girls walking in parallel avenues glow. The girls walk in pairs, swinging their hips, strutting like swans under the foam of their ribbons and flounces; sometimes they land on garden seats, as if tired by the idle parade, and the bells of their flowered muslin skirts expand on the seats, like roses beginning to shed their petals. And then they disclose their crossed legs—white irresistibly expressive shapes—and the young men, passing them, grow speechless and pale, hit by the accuracy of the argument, completely convinced and conquered.

  At a particular moment before dusk all the colors of the world become more beautiful than ever, festive, ardent yet sad. The park quickly fills with pink varnish, with shining lacquer that makes every other color glow deeper; and at the same time the beauty of the colors becomes too glaring and somewhat suspect. In another instant the thickets of the park strewn with young greenery, still naked and twiggy, fill with the pinkness of dusk, shot with coolness, spilling the indescribable sadness of things supremely beautiful but mortal.

  Then the whole park becomes an enormous, silent orchestra, solemn and composed, waiting under the raised baton of the conductor for its music to ripen and rise; and over that potential, earnest symphony a quick theatrical dusk spreads suddenly as if brought down by the sounds swelling in the instruments. Above, the young greenness of the leaves is pierced by the tones of an invisible oriole, and at once everything turns somber, lonely, and late, like an evening forest.

  A hardly perceptible breeze sails through the treetops, from which dry petals of cherry blossom fall in a shower. A tart scent drifts high under the dusky sky and floats like a premonition of death, and the first stars shed their tears like lilac blooms picked from pale, purple bushes.

  It is then that a strange desperation grips the youths and young girls walking up and down and meeting at regular intervals. Each man transcends himself, becomes handsome and irresistible like a Don Juan, and his eyes express a murderous strength that chills a woman's heart. The girls' eyes sink deeper and reveal dark labyrinthine pools. Their pupils distend, open without resistance, and admit those conquerors who stare into their opaque darkness. Hidden paths of the park reveal themselves and lead to thickets, ever deeper and more rustling, in which they lose themselves, as in a backstage tangle of velvet curtains and secluded corners. And no one knows how they reach, through the coolness of these completely forgotten darkened gardens, the strange spots where darkness ferments and degenerates, and vegetation emits a smell like the sediment in long-forgotten wine barrels.

  Wandering blindly in the dark plush of the gardens, the young people meet at last in an empty clearing, under the last purple glow of the setting sun, over a pond that has been growing muddy for years; on a rotting balustrade, somewhere at the back gate of the world, they find themselves again in pre-existence, a life long past, in attitudes of a distant age; they sob and plead, rise to promises never to be fulfilled, and, climb
ing up the steps of exaltation, reach summits and climaxes beyond which there is only death and the numbness of nameless delight.

  XVII

  What is a spring dusk?

  Have we now reached the crux of the matter, and is this the end of the road? We are beginning to be at a loss for words: they become confused, meandering, and raving. And yet it is beyond these words that the description of that unbelievable, immense spring must begin. The miracle of dusk! Again, the power of our magic has failed and the dark element that cannot be embraced is roaring somewhere beyond it. Words are split into their components and dissolved, they return to their etymology, re-enter their depths and distant obscure roots. This process is to be taken literally. For it is getting dark, our words lose themselves among unclear associations: Acheron, Orcus, the Underworld ... Do you feel darkness seeping out of these words, molehills crumbling, the smell of cellars, of graves slowly opening? What is a spring dusk? We ask this question once more, the fervent refrain of our quest that must remain unrewarded.

  When the tree roots want to speak, when under the turf a great many old tales and ancient sagas have been collected, when too many whispers have been gathered underground, inarticulate pulp and dark nameless things that existed before words—then the bark of trees blackens and disintegrates into thick, rough scales which form deep furrows. You dip your face into that fluffy fur of dusk, and everything becomes impenetrable and airless like under the lid of a coffin. Then you must screw up your eyes and bully them, squeeze your sight through the impenetrable, push across the dull humus—and suddenly you are at your goal, on the other side; you are in the Deep, in the Underworld. And you can see . . .